Adobe: 64-bit Mac Creative Suite apps won't happen till v5.0 - Page 3

So once again Adobe are saying that if we want to take full advantage of the current OS we'll need to wait on the next iteration of their software.

Great. So what's new?

If CS4 doesn't provide support for 64-bit then what will it provide, stability with 10.5?

The commercial arts market is ripe for a new developer to come in and wipe the floor with the likes of Adobe. Adobe has become lazy, and lazy companies have a habit of falling from favour (just look at Quark).

Either Apple has to start writing it's own commercial arts software, or Adobe has to write its own OS.

The commercial arts market is ripe for a new developer to come in and wipe the floor with the likes of Adobe. Adobe has become lazy, and lazy companies have a habit of falling from favour (just look at Quark)....

Either Apple has to start writing it's own commercial arts software, or Adobe has to write its own OS.

Aperture. It is tasty. No [pro or semi-pro] photographer wants to really go through a shoot of 1000s of shots using Photoshop anymore, unless they have specialised techniques, target markets, etc.

Keynote. Do you realise what you can create in Keynote? Perfect blend of simple, non-destructible vector, type, and raster tools.

Adobe Mac will still be significant but you will see it shrink somewhat in relevance. I believe Adobe is pushing heavily into PC land with Acrobat, Air, Lightroom/Elements. CS4 will be 32bit, Aperture 2.5/3.0 will be 6tyfantasticfourbits... Lightroom on Mac? I think Aperture 2+ gives it a good run for the money.

The trend is somewhat clear now, I believe.

Final Cut Studio 2.x, 3.x will truly destroy the competition when you have 8 or 16 core rigs with 32GB, 64GB RAM.

Remember also though that Apple is about Retail more and more. There is a good momentum of corporate and pro markets though that are riding in the slipstream "behind" the Retail push.

Well I am clearly just rambling so I will stop here. Brain jam. Gotta go listen to some trance music (Sequentia!!! AWESOME)

I have a couple of questions. In fact, they're the same questions that Strobe has been asking.

If Carbon was just meant to be a transition, then why did Apple go to all the trouble of getting a 64-bit released as a beta, before pulling it at the last minute? As far as I can see, up until the WWDC, Adobe was rightly confident that they would have a 64-bit version of Carbon to work with.

The other thing I don't quite get, is why folk are coming down so hard on Adobe for not starting the switch to Cocoa eight years ago, when Apple has not released Cocoa versions of the Finder, iTunes or Final Cut? Why didn't Apple eat its own dog food and start the work eight years ago either?

The important thing is that Adobe is committed to doing the port, and I think that should be applauded, because they could have quite easily have turned around and said 'dual boot.'

And Strobe is right about something else; there are very few applications that share the complexity of Photoshop (or MS Office for that matter) that are written in Cocoa, so Adobe is going to be right out there on the bleeding edge with this development; it will be interesting to see what problems they run into.

Personally, I think that come the WWDC, Apple is going to have a number of announcements that will nail Adobe and MS to the wall, but in the likely event that I'm wrong, I'm going to support Adobe in their efforts to get their stuff onto the Mac, by not bitching about stuff they couldn't possibly have known about.

My mistake I didn't resized Adobe gets paid when they devote resources to something that doesn't ship. I wish my company worked like that.. I've got to look into this more.

You do...if you work as a programmer for a company and you're not getting paid every week or even if the product you work on doesn't ship, I say go work for another company...because you got seriously gypped.

Quote:

My mistake again I guess I was hallucinating when Activity Monitor was showing that Photoshop was using 100% of the 3.5GB of memory I've allotted to it and I was getting scratch disc warnings from Photoshop preventing me from doing a transform action I needed to do even though the scratch disc has 159 GB available. (This is after I closed out of other open Apps that use the scratch disc and my other open PSD docs). I wish I had more then 4 GB on my system because it's painfully obvious that that extra 500Mb I could give to Photoshop would have magically changed my workflow.

Yeah, hallucinations are bad.

Quote:

My mistake again. I guess my friend who has been a developer since 1981 working for Sun, Microsoft, Apple and Oracle to name a few before starting up his own software company, must have just woke up on the wrong side of the bed when he was bitching about loosing the use of hundreds of thousands of lines of code from something that was indicated it would be supported. But I guess it's ok because of the logic in your first response he just gets paid... I really got to look into that. He's making all this money from code he can't use anymore and makes more money magically by rewriting it even if he doesn't ship a product. That is cool!

The commercial arts market is ripe for a new developer to come in and wipe the floor with the likes of Adobe. Adobe has become lazy, and lazy companies have a habit of falling from favour (just look at Quark).

Either Apple has to start writing it's own commercial arts software, or Adobe has to write its own OS.

Hey, if we expect CS-4 sometime in late 2009/Early 2010, doesn't that put CS5 out, hypothetically sometime in 2012 or so?

By that point, 64-bit PC architecture will have been widespread for about 15 years (at least on the Macintosh PowerPC platform) - isn't it realistic to think that 128-bit architecture will be pretty widespread by then? Especially since 32-bit processors only had a lifespan of about 6-8 years on the consumer market?

That'll mean that we'll all be complaining about lack of 128-bit support in CS-5 by the time we get 64-bit support

The commercial arts market is ripe for a new developer to come in and wipe the floor with the likes of Adobe. Adobe has become lazy, and lazy companies have a habit of falling from favour (just look at Quark).

Either Apple has to start writing it's own commercial arts software, or Adobe has to write its own OS.

I don't see how you can call Adobe lazy - they just released a set of about 20 different products that work together amazingly and are head an shoulders above anything else in the industry. CS3 is a giant leap above CS2 as a fully integrated product, and they've included so many new features as well as finalizing the merge of the former macromedia products into CS3 and having the entire package, in many different configurations, basically as stable and well-running as any other major software company could ever hope for.

What more do you want?

Quark has fallen from favour mainly because it doesn't offer the same integration as InDesign can, the same way that WordPerfect couldn't compete with the integrated options that Microsoft Office presented to Word users...

I'm sick fed-up of Adobe developing proprietary solutions that screw up the rest of the system. Remember the CS2/Suitcase fiasco? After all, what is wrong with the way that the OS structures/caches the fonts? What's wrong with the Apple open/save dialog boxes? What's wrong with the system wide window manager?

Adobe, like Microsoft applications, just burst on to a Mac and say "fuck the rules, this is how we roll".

Why was there code in Photoshop CS2 that had been there from the first version of Photoshop, forcing Adobe to write CS3 from scratch, and now that it's finally mainstream it doesn't even play nice with the current OS?

Why the fuck does Apple release developer versions of its up-and-coming OSs?

I'm sick fed-up of buying the current release of Adobe apps to find out that they don't play nice, and that if you want them to play nice, you'll have to wait for the next release.

So to hear Adobe bitching about how CS5, when CS4 hasn't even been released, sticks in the craw a bit.

You do...if you work as a programmer for a company and you're not getting paid every week or even if the product you work on doesn't ship, I say go work for another company...because you got seriously gypped.

I wrote "Developer" and was talking about the "Developer", which is Adobe.
Adobe is the one who allocates time and money on this and thus I think they do care.

Obviously you don't care, which is fine by me.
You asked who cares and stated nobody. For some reason you care more about the fact that there are people who care about this.

Quote:

Yeah, hallucinations are bad.

Ya thank G-d I was only being sarcastic. Hallucinations at work are probably doubly worse.
That being said I could have used more memory for my Photoshop work yesterday.

Quote:

Give names or he doesn't exist.

If you don't know someone's name they don't exist? Wow your harsh!
His name is Gary and he is a very nice and helpful guy.

All my life, I always wanted to be somebody. Now I see that I should have been more specific.- Lily Tomlin

I have a couple of questions. In fact, they're the same questions that Strobe has been asking.

If Carbon was just meant to be a transition, then why did Apple go to all the trouble of getting a 64-bit released as a beta, before pulling it at the last minute? As far as I can see, up until the WWDC, Adobe was rightly confident that they would have a 64-bit version of Carbon to work with.

The other thing I don't quite get, is why folk are coming down so hard on Adobe for not starting the switch to Cocoa eight years ago, when Apple has not released Cocoa versions of the Finder, iTunes or Final Cut? Why didn't Apple eat its own dog food and start the work eight years ago either?

The important thing is that Adobe is committed to doing the port, and I think that should be applauded, because they could have quite easily have turned around and said 'dual boot.'

And Strobe is right about something else; there are very few applications that share the complexity of Photoshop (or MS Office for that matter) that are written in Cocoa, so Adobe is going to be right out there on the bleeding edge with this development; it will be interesting to see what problems they run into.

Personally, I think that come the WWDC, Apple is going to have a number of announcements that will nail Adobe and MS to the wall, but in the likely event that I'm wrong, I'm going to support Adobe in their efforts to get their stuff onto the Mac, by not bitching about stuff they couldn't possibly have known about.

Unfortunately, either you never worked for Apple or Adobe to know that Adobe, Macromedia and Microsoft threatened to jump the platform, on more than one ocassiona, if Apple didn't keep Carbon around and extend it.

You would have read this more than once already if you had just read the entire thread.

Now that Apple solvency is much greater than Adobe and that Microsoft still needs revenues seeing it's markets are starting to erode on many fronts, Apple made the move to complete end Carbon by canceling 64 bit work on it.

This announcement was made fact at WWDC 2007. So nearly 12 months later Adobe releases a statement at Apple pulled the rug out from them.

Nevermind that Adobe has delayed porting to Cocoa for 11 years. Adobe doesn't have the pull it once had and now that Macromedia merged with Adobe it's clear that it didn't make them stronger to leverage against Apple.

If you read through that thread, you will see that Adobe's stance with CS3 problems in Leopard is that it is basically Apple's fault and they are not going to be doing anything about the issues.

I still think Adobe's commitment lies very much with Windows users.

Quote:

Originally Posted by mdriftmeyer

Now it's over and Adobe has no longer the leverage it once held.

Apple can thrive without them.

What's worse for Adobe is this little known application that they borrowed many ideas from back starting in 1997:

I disagree, I think if Apple didn't have Adobe, I certainly wouldn't be using a Mac, nor would any of the designers I work with. I even considered switching over completely when there was no native CS suite for such a long time and I saw that Adobe software generally runs faster on Windows. The rest of the OS put me off so I'm sticking to OS X now but I would put up with the problems on Windows if Adobe software became unusable on OS X.

Quote:

Originally Posted by mdriftmeyer

What makes this point relevant is the fact that it's creators shutdown operations of Caffeine Soft to go work for Apple in the Quartz Team, Applications Teams.

If Apple wants to really screw Adobe it can release a new product that can do 90% of what Photoshop does, today, and for a fraction of the price.

Then Apple can open up the plugin-in API and offer a low cost add-on to bury Adobe by duplicating what Photoshop does but works seemlessly within Apple's workflow application suites.

Apple can but will it?

If they could, it would still be irrelevant. An app that doesn't do as much as Photoshop still won't rival the CS Suite, which has Flash, Dreamweaver, illustrator, Indesign, Fireworks, Photoshop and more.

iweb is nowhere near good enough relative to Dreamweaver
Apple have no vector software and are not likely to get it
Motion is not as good as After Effects by a long way
Pixelmator, Quartz apps etc have a long way to reach Photoshop level especially with the number of plugins

Taking all that into account, IMO Apple *need* Adobe to remain viable in most professional lines of creative work.

Quote:

Originally Posted by rain

If a render is going to take 5 min over 4 minutes, no designer cares, we are busy trolling sites like this or off getting a cup of coffee and conversing with co-workers.

Don't I know it and playing your damn hippie/funky/repetitive/out of tune music too loud. All the while us developers try to get the real work done.

First of all it isn't always easier to write in Cocoa, especially when you have your own platform neutral interface code in C++.

Exactly. I wish that Apple hadn't made the distinction at all, though it makes sense in some ways. Just transparently make it so that code works no matter what it is. There was no need to give people an identity to hate in the form of Carbon especially since there is no way they can clearly define what it is to the general public to whom these identities matter.

A Cocoa project can be entirely C/C++ but naturally so can a Carbon one. So if they have the same code then how do they differ? It's just the libraries they are linked to (the stuff from NexT vs the stuff from OS 9) but if the two apps work the same way then there's no difference at all. With most cross-platform code like Photoshop, they'll rely on custom code over system libraries anyway to ensure that OS updates don't break their app and that the feature works the same way on different platforms.

The reason they won't have gotten rid of those old libraries and might never do so is that if an app uses those libraries and has a great deal of code reliant on it, it's not as simple as switching to the Cocoa equivalent as it will do things a different way. In a small app, this is a fairly easy task. In an app with hundreds of millions of lines of code, it isn't easy and it isn't worth it.

People often forget the time frame involved here. OS X is a relatively new platform and it's only been on the market for 8 years. An average developer can code around 1000 lines of useful code a month. A good developer can probably double that so co-ordinating thousands of developers to work on tens of millions of lines of code isn't an easy task.

60 million / (1000 devs * 2000 LOC pm) = 30 months = 2.5 years, which is about how long we waited for CS3.

I reckon that although 64-bit is useful now, it is not of the utmost importance based on the number of people who need it. The number of people with 8GB+ Ram in their Macs will be very small.

What I never understood about Photoshop and generally all creative apps is why they don't have paging systems where only a certain portion of an image is loaded into Ram. Then all they need is various snapshots at different resolutions that would be updated with the changes made to a portion. Photoshop and other apps already do this to an extent but they still load the entire file. You can speed up Photoshop's image loading by reducing these levels from about 8 I think default to 1 in the performance section.

For example, say you have a 10000x10000 image and it's a picture of a person and you need to touch up the face. Why load that image entirely? Simply create a snapshot that is the size of the display resolution. Then allow people to pick an area to work on and it will load another snapshot of the face at screen resolution (this would not be recompressed). Computers are fast enough that this process should be dynamic and you should in theory be able to work on infinite resolution images with as little as 1 GB Ram. The only part that would strain is creating the snapshots but OS X can make thumbnails of folders of 2000x2000 images in real-time.

It would still struggle if you were editing 20%+ of the image at a time but for high resolution images, people would be working on smaller details. It would also still struggle on copy/paste buffers and file saving but for a good deal of uses, it should speed things up considerably.

Indesign would only load 3 pages at full resolution at a time and you'd just see snapshots at any other scale.

I disagree, I think if Apple didn't have Adobe, I certainly wouldn't be using a Mac, nor would any of the designers I work with. I even considered switching over completely when there was no native CS suite for such a long time and I saw that Adobe software generally runs faster on Windows. The rest of the OS put me off so I'm sticking to OS X now but I would put up with the problems on Windows if Adobe software became unusable on OS X.

If they could, it would still be irrelevant. An app that doesn't do as much as Photoshop still won't rival the CS Suite, which has Flash, Dreamweaver, illustrator, Indesign, Fireworks, Photoshop and more.

iweb is nowhere near good enough relative to Dreamweaver
Apple have no vector software and are not likely to get it
Motion is not as good as After Effects by a long way
Pixelmator, Quartz apps etc have a long way to reach Photoshop level especially with the number of plugins

Taking all that into account, IMO Apple *need* Adobe to remain viable in most professional lines of creative work.

Don't I know it and playing your damn hippie/funky/repetitive/out of tune music too loud. All the while us developers try to get the real work done.

Exactly. I wish that Apple hadn't made the distinction at all, though it makes sense in some ways. Just transparently make it so that code works no matter what it is. There was no need to give people an identity to hate in the form of Carbon especially since there is no way they can clearly define what it is to the general public to whom these identities matter.

A Cocoa project can be entirely C/C++ but naturally so can a Carbon one. So if they have the same code then how do they differ? It's just the libraries they are linked to (the stuff from NexT vs the stuff from OS 9) but if the two apps work the same way then there's no difference at all. With most cross-platform code like Photoshop, they'll rely on custom code over system libraries anyway to ensure that OS updates don't break their app and that the feature works the same way on different platforms.

The reason they won't have gotten rid of those old libraries and might never do so is that if an app uses those libraries and has a great deal of code reliant on it, it's not as simple as switching to the Cocoa equivalent as it will do things a different way. In a small app, this is a fairly easy task. In an app with hundreds of millions of lines of code, it isn't easy and it isn't worth it.

People often forget the time frame involved here. OS X is a relatively new platform and it's only been on the market for 8 years. An average developer can code around 1000 lines of useful code a month. A good developer can probably double that so co-ordinating thousands of developers to work on tens of millions of lines of code isn't an easy task.

60 million / (1000 devs * 2000 LOC pm) = 30 months = 2.5 years, which is about how long we waited for CS3.

I reckon that although 64-bit is useful now, it is not of the utmost importance based on the number of people who need it. The number of people with 8GB+ Ram in their Macs will be very small.

What I never understood about Photoshop and generally all creative apps is why they don't have paging systems where only a certain portion of an image is loaded into Ram. Then all they need is various snapshots at different resolutions that would be updated with the changes made to a portion. Photoshop and other apps already do this to an extent but they still load the entire file. You can speed up Photoshop's image loading by reducing these levels from about 8 I think default to 1 in the performance section.

For example, say you have a 10000x10000 image and it's a picture of a person and you need to touch up the face. Why load that image entirely? Simply create a snapshot that is the size of the display resolution. Then allow people to pick an area to work on and it will load another snapshot of the face at screen resolution (this would not be recompressed). Computers are fast enough that this process should be dynamic and you should in theory be able to work on infinite resolution images with as little as 1 GB Ram. The only part that would strain is creating the snapshots but OS X can make thumbnails of folders of 2000x2000 images in real-time.

It would still struggle if you were editing 20%+ of the image at a time but for high resolution images, people would be working on smaller details. It would also still struggle on copy/paste buffers and file saving but for a good deal of uses, it should speed things up considerably.

Indesign would only load 3 pages at full resolution at a time and you'd just see snapshots at any other scale.

Firstly, Photoshop isn't hundreds of millions of lines of code.

Secondly, the 60 Million lines of code change covered the entire CS3 Suite of Applications, not just Photoshop.

They punted on moving to Cocoa and now that year has almost elapsed from the official announcement of Carbon 64 being dead, they release a press statement outlining that they won't be able to make CS4 Cocoa.

Here's a thought: Pick an application to make Cocoa ready by the time CS 4 is released.

People don't necessarily need to buy an entire application suite.

Here's a second thought: Don't stiff your customers on price for a single application and/or on being ineligible for future upgrades to applications suites.

I disagree, I think if Apple didn't have Adobe, I certainly wouldn't be using a Mac, nor would any of the designers I work with. I even considered switching over completely when there was no native CS suite for such a long time and I saw that Adobe software generally runs faster on Windows. The rest of the OS put me off so I'm sticking to OS X now but I would put up with the problems on Windows if Adobe software became unusable on OS X.

I think by the time CS4 ships VMWare will have worked out all the issues with running 64bit Vista cleanly with CS4. Then you can allocated quite a bit of memory and processing capability to the application.

Quote:

Taking all that into account, IMO Apple *need* Adobe to remain viable in most professional lines of creative work.

Perhaps. On the other hand with virtualization and Boot Camp it's not unlikely that Apple shops might not stay the course until CS5.

Quote:

People often forget the time frame involved here. OS X is a relatively new platform and it's only been on the market for 8 years. An average developer can code around 1000 lines of useful code a month. A good developer can probably double that so co-ordinating thousands of developers to work on tens of millions of lines of code isn't an easy task.

60 million / (1000 devs * 2000 LOC pm) = 30 months = 2.5 years, which is about how long we waited for CS3.

I would be mildly surprised if Adobe spent 2500 person years just to update CS3 on the Mac platform. Eh, it's possible, Adobe IS a big company making a lot of money but the level of effort to update/port is typically much lower than to write it in the first place.

I think by the time CS4 ships VMWare will have worked out all the issues with running 64bit Vista cleanly with CS4. Then you can allocated quite a bit of memory and processing capability to the application.

Virtualization still isn't good enough for creative software though regarding interface refresh, Ram (all allocated at once is very inefficient), fonts (can't use the Mac fonts), copying files from one OS to the other (redundancy).

Quote:

Originally Posted by vinea

I would be mildly surprised if Adobe spent 2500 person years just to update CS3 on the Mac platform. Eh, it's possible, Adobe IS a big company making a lot of money but the level of effort to update/port is typically much lower than to write it in the first place.

They didn't just do an update though, they merged the Macromedia suite too. They decided to make the development effort all at once. Despite the frustration it caused using CS under Rosetta, I think it was the right decision. It was done pretty late but Adobe probably knew about the Macromedia takeover a while ago as well as the issues with the Mac developer tools and made their decision around that.

At least with CS3, there is a good, stable unified base to work from and I hope they begin to cut down the suite to make it more refined.

Wow Pixelmator is nice! Add Curves, Color Modes, Path tool, and Slices and it will become a very serious contender to Adobe's Photoshop.

PixelMator should be bought by Apple and beefed WAAY up. It is great on my G5, and its programed in Cocoa and uses Core techs as well, the filters run basically in real time as you adjust their settings. It is a awesome little app. Everyone should check it out!

PixelMator should be bought by Apple and beefed WAAY up. It is great on my G5, and its programed in Cocoa and uses Core techs as well, the filters run basically in real time as you adjust their settings. It is a awesome little app. Everyone should check it out!

No, keep it small and independent.

The Pixelmator team has done a fantastic job so far. All they need to do is add CMYK support and I'm in.

I'm not a power user, and 95% of the time I open Photoshop it is to crop/resize, and convert to CMYK for use with InDesign.

I'm beginning to see the makings of designers becoming liberated from Adobe in the future.
At least if they want to be.

Pixelmator, Lineform and Freeway are small nimble competitors that are Cocoa-ready now.

I would imagine that Quark is now much hungrier than Adobe, and Xpress will make it to Cocoa before InDesign does.

What these four (in particular) should do is to stay small and nimble, but create an alliance based on open standards and beta-test each other's work for inter-operability.